In 1962, Spain was Sven Berlin’s holiday destination. Sven had been painting and Juanita ‘looking at horses’ in Portugal. Berlin painted work full of its glorious colour, just like this landscape, from our Art Shop, the Blue Hills of Madrid (detail). They had made several trips through the Spanish countryside, on the way back from the Camargue in France and the Gypsy festival of Les Saintes Maries which takes place on the 24th May each year (coincidentally Mai Zetterling’s birthday!)
Just one year earlier, Juanita recalled in her autobiography:
“On through Madrid, where we stopped for a few days and where the proprietor, a Frenchman with a histrionic moustache, was bemoaning the decapitation in a storm of his prized banana trees: “Oh Madame – les bananes! Helás, les bananes…” We went to a bullfight in the magnificent Plaza de (Toros) Monumentales, the epicentre of the corrida, and finally drew in under cool pines to the Laughing Whale camp site near Barcelona.” (Azerbaijan! Millersford Press, 2009)
That year they would fly to Mallorca to see Robert Graves in a bid to revive their marriage…which they did, if only for a short while.
Comments